Starred Review. Beginning with the premise that "poets are among the most fearless of writers when it comes to self-revelation," poet and psychiatrist Berlin (How JFK Killed My Father) examines the ambiguous, age-old relationship between writing and madness by asking leading contemporary poets to discuss psychiatric treatment and their work. The result is a fascinating collection of 16 essays, as insightful as they are compulsively readable. Each is honest and sharply written, covering a range of issues (depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, psychosis, substance abuse or, in acutely deadpan Andrew Hudgins's case, "tics, twitches, allergies, tooth-grinding, acid reflux, migraines... and shingles") along with treatment methods, incorporating personal anecdotes and excerpts from poems and journals. Though they dwell in the darker corners of the creative process-frustration, anxiety, isolation-each contributor carries a measure of the joy Gwyneth Lewis felt at age seven, when she wrote her first poem: "This activity made me happier than anything I knew." It's a sentiment that both haunts and inspires: after 12 years without writing, medical doctor Jack Coulehan found in the "healing power of language" the key to lifting lifelong chronic anxiety. Medication is a trickier subject. Though it's an undisputable help, the difficulty in finding the right "cocktail" of pills and the array of side effects-for Chase Twitchell it turns off his "metaphor-making faculty" like a spigot-make it a painful challenge. Anyone affected by mental illness or intrigued by the question of its role in the arts should find this volume absorbing.
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A fascinating collection of 16 essays, as insightful as they are compulsively readable.
(
Publishers Weekly (starred review) 2008)
All agree that the sick brain often spells catastrophe for the creative mind.
(
New York Times 2008)
The book shows that good poets also write vigorous, engaging prose. Richard Berlin has done a marvelous job of showing us how ordinary poets are; the selected poets have shown us that mental illness shares with other experiences a capacity to reveal our humanity.
(
Metapsychology 2008)
At once instructive and poignant, Poets on Prozac constitutes an important addition to the literature on creativity and mental illness... An illuminating read both for mental health professionals who work with creative people and for artists who are contemplating treatment options.
(
New England Journal of Medicine 2008)
This book belongs on the shelves of all therapists who treat women and men who immerse themselves in creative writing or any other fine art. Dr. Berlin's pithy introduction provides a useful summary of the relationship between creativity and emotional disorder. The 16 essays and the poetic excerpts that bolster them share the virtues of being heartfelt, accessible, and brief. They can be read by highly literate women and men, even those in the midst of an emotional maelstrom.
(
American Journal of Psychiatry 2008)
Each essayist (and the book as a whole) certainly has an audience, most faithfully in poets.
(Roxanna Font
Bellevue Literary Review 2008)
This collection of brilliant essays does not resolve the relative contribution that medication (ranging from SSRIs to orthomolecular treatment) makes to the resolution of a creative person's fallow periods and blocks. Like the creative process itself, the picture that emerges is idiosyncratic and, perhaps, understood better as an appreciation than as analysis.
(
Choice 2009)
The book's claim to uniqueness lies chiefly in the character of the authors and the poetry with which they express their feelings.
(
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 2008)
In providing these poets with a voice in prose, Richard M. Berlin, himself both a healer and an artist, provides telling insights into both mental illness and the creative process.
(Harvey Fenigsohn
Lamar Soutter Library Book Reviews 2008)
Endlessly fascinating.
(Brooke Allen
Hudson Review 2009)
This collection of essays would be particularly useful to psychiatrists who have patients from the creative world of literature but I believe also from music, fine art or theatre.
(
British Journal of Psychiatry 2009)
Through the words of poets, this book celebrates the idea that health is not an end point—and that healing is a lifelong process.
(Dagan Coppock, MD
Psychiatric Times )
An exceptional collection of poetically written and stirring accounts of overcoming mental suffering that provides valuable affirmation and understanding of the antithesis between mental illness and creative achievement. Although this is not a systematic scientific study, it vividly points to the ways that psychiatric treatment, which itself involves a mutual creative process between patient and therapist, may frequently improve poetic creativity.
(Albert Rothenberg, M.D., Harvard University, author of
Creativity and Madness: New Findings and Old Stereotypes and
The Creative Process of Psychotherapy )
In brilliantly illuminating the interplay between creativity and mental illness, Richard Berlin's fascinating book shows us poets in the process of becoming healers—not only of themselves, but also of others, and even of society at large. Whether it is Denise Duhamel purposefully confronting bulimia in a spirited, long-lined poem, or Jack Coulehan more intuitively seeking structure through received poetic forms to calm anxiety, we experience firsthand 'dis-ease' as an incitement to the creative act, and, in turn, the tremendous power of imaginative language to interrogate and to assuage our suffering.
(Rafael Campo, M.A., M.D., D.Litt. (Hon), Harvard Medical School )
